Good and True Story by Paul M. Gould

Good and True Story Reviews

• 
  George P.

  I once cold-called a young woman named Tiffany for a date. My call went straight to voice mail, so I left a message that began with these words, “Hi! My name is George P. Wood … .”
  
  After a few dates, she told me that the use of my middle initial made her laugh. Who does he think he is? she thought. Alex P. Keaton? (For all you youngsters, Keaton was an uptight young man in the 1980s sitcom, Family Ties.)
  
  Hearing this, I explained that the men in my family are all named George, so we use our middle initials to differentiate us: George R. (grandfather), George O. (father), and George P. (me).
  

  Eventually Tiffany and I married and she started calling me P. Wood. Then we had a son whom we named George (obviously), though my wife insisted we call him by his middle name, Reese.
  
  I tell you all this to make a point: Narratives shape our identity. By telling you about a cold call twenty years ago, you’ve learned about my ancestry, my marriage, my son, and even the TV shows that shaped my wife’s cultural stereotypes.
  
  “Our identity is wrapped up with the story of our lives: the story we tell, the story we live in,” writes philosopher Paul M. Gould. He goes on to say, “the deep longing of the human heart is for a story that is both true and satisfying” (emphasis in original). We want what the title of his book promises — A Good and True Story.
  
  Gould’s book is about two cultural metanarratives — story-shaping stories — that lie beneath the surface of a thousand smaller personal narratives: “the nonreligious story” versus “the religious story.” Like all stories, these two stories have a beginning, middle, and end.
  
  The nonreligious story begins with matter, which is all that exists. In this story, there is no spiritual world. Because the material world is what Tennyson called “red in tooth and claw,” human beings live vulnerable existences. Thanks to advances in knowledge, however, we have built technologies and instituted social practices that buffer the difficulties we experience in life.
  
  By contrast, the religious story begins with God, whom Gould defines as “an immaterial personal being that is worthy of worship.” God creates humanity, which has become alienated from Him. Unsatisfied with this alienation, God intervenes to reconcile humanity to himself. Union with God is the end of the story.
  
  These two stories are binary. If one is true, the other is false. So how do we decide between them?
  
  In successive chapters, Gould describes 11 “physical and metaphysical pointers” that “show us the way to God.” They do so whether considered individually or cumulatively. In other words, each points to God, but together they have greater explanatory scope and power.
  
  So, what are the signs? Gould’s chapter titles offer one-word descriptions: universe, life, species, humans, morality, meaning, happiness, pain, love, beauty, and religion. Rather than summarizing each chapter, let me focus on just two: morality and pain.
  
  Start with morality. As we go through life, we discern both values and obligations. We value actions as either good or bad. For example, honest testimony is good, while perjury is bad. More than valuing honest testimony, however, we feel obligated to tell the truth.
  
  The nonmoral story has difficulty explaining why this is so. After all, how do you get moral values from brute matter? And while science may describe what is via natural laws, it cannot prescribe what ought to be.  Gould writes, “Evolutionary naturalism” — a technical term for the nonreligious story — “cannot ground objective moral obligations.”
  
  If God exists, however, then value and obligation make sense. “Objective moral goodness exists because God exists as a perfectly good and self-existent being that wills to bring into being various valuable states of affairs,” writes Gould. “Objective moral obligations exist because God has created humans to flourish in various ways, and when we live as we ought to live, we flourish in light of that nature.”
  
  Gould’s statement brings us to pain. If the nonreligious story has a problem explaining moral value and obligation, the experience of pain — which seems opposite of flourishing — constitutes a problem for the religious story. How can an all-good, all-powerful God allow suffering?
  
  The answer, Gould argues, revolves around meeting two conditions: “our suffering benefits us, and our highest good extends beyond this world.” We intuitively realize that in some cases, “No pain, no gain” is true. Working out at a gym is one example. Going through surgery for cancer is another.
  
  Unfortunately, we don’t always experience gains in this life. Think of the religious believer who is arrested, tortured, then executed for their faith. What did they gain from their suffering? Nothing, if this life is the only life there is. If there is no hereafter, then Paul was right. Our motto should be, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die” (1 Corinthians 15:32).
  
  But if there is a hereafter, then there is a possibility that the pains of this life will be more than made up for in the life to come with God. “Pain and suffering and evil point, if we listen, beyond this world to Another,” writes Gould.
  
  If Gould is right about morality and pain, as well as the other signs he discusses, then people have good reason to believe the religious story instead of the nonreligious story. It is both true and satisfactory.
  
  But is the religious story specifically Christian? The first ten signs establish the case for a generic theism. It is only with the eleventh sign — evidence for Jesus — that Gould’s case becomes specifically Christian. If I had to characterize the flow of his argument, I would say it moves through three phases: from creation (universe, life, species, humans) to character (morality, meaning, happiness, pain, love, beauty) to Christ (religion).
  
  I believe Gould makes a reasonable argument. At minimum, he shows that religious belief can be rational. That is why I would recommend his book to non-Christian friends who have an open mind about faith, spirituality, and religion. It just might convince them that the gospel story is both good and true.
  
  Book Reviewed
  Paul M. Gould, A Good and True Story: Eleven Clues to Understanding Our Universe and Your Place in It (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2022).
  
  P.S. If you like my review, please click
  “Helpful” on my Amazon review page.
  
  P.P.S. This review is cross-posted from
  InfluenceMagazine.com by permission.
• 
  Conrade Yap

  Who am I? What is my calling? What is my purpose in life? What am I supposed to be doing with my life? Where am I supposed to be? These questions about our identity, origin, purpose, and significance, can all be answered via two stories: One nonreligious and the other religious. The latter begins and ends with God. The former depends basically on science and a non-religious explanation of life. This includes the five philosophies of scientism, materialism, reductionism, atheism, and nihilism. With these two angles on life, author and professor Paul Gould then compares and contrasts them via eleven aspects of life. These eleven "clues" to life are:
  
  1) The Universe
  2) Life
  3) Species
  4) Humans
  5) Morality
  6) Meaning
  7) Happiness
  8) Pain
  9) Love
  10) Beauty
  11) Religion
  
  For any view to be true, he issues a challenge for a more probable explanation for the existence of each of these "clues." These individual subjects are probed scientifically and philosophically, using both lenses of religious and non-religious thoughts.
  
  In "Life," he issues the questions of origin, of how life gets started in the first place, and the meaning of the end of life. He debunks the argument of non-explanation by using the very existence of intelligence. Life itself is pointing us to find out more about its mysteries. Such mysteries include the presence of "Species" where we marvel at the presence of organisms in our world. Gould challenges Darwin's "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection" assumptions by arguing against the nature of "natural selection" and the unlikeliness of "accidental invention." The creative capacity in life cannot be adequately explained by either of these. On humans, he looks at how evolutionary science and human uniqueness can explain the existence of human beings. These four "clues" are what he calls Lady Nature. The rest of the clues deal more with other features of reality. How do we understand the sources of morality? What is the best explanation of the existence of good and evil? How do we make sense of meaning, of love, and of longing? What about the presence and pursuit of happiness? Is the presence of pain an adequate argument against the existence of God? What are the reasons for love? Is beauty a way in which we acknowledge the transcendent? Gould finally comes back to the topic of religion and calls this his most personal chapter. Not only does he assert the truth of religious thought, he affirms that unique Truth in Christianity.
  
  My Thoughts
  ==============
  A constant theme in this book is the effort to show us that there is more to reality than the physical universe. This is one of the most philosophical books on apologetics I have ever read. Covering both areas of Nature as well as perceptions of reality, he leads us through each of these clues in a manner that is systematic, persuasive, and convicting. He does not shy away from asserting the Christian position. He engages some of the most common propositions by non-religious figures such as Anthony Flew, Douglas Adams, Bertrand Russell, Charles Darwin, David Hume, etc. The way he does it is with respectful references to science, rationale, and common sense reasoning about how to best describe the meaning of life through the eleven clues. By calling this book a "Good and True Story," Gould is telling us that there is a story worth telling, worth discovering, and worth living. Nothing happens in a vacuum. Just because one cannot explain something does not mean we should dismiss them as unexplainable or meaningless. Subtly, Gould is saying to us that belief is a lot more plausible than unbelief in a Creator God.
  
  The author takes pains to lead us through dense philosophical thought. Like a good scholar, he guides us through the various levels of reasoning before giving us his conclusions and the reasons for them. Life happens and things do happen for a reason. It is this presupposition that enables us to continue to quest to discover, learn, and grow in our awareness of the world we live in. Gould has boldly asked big questions about our world. Philosophy is the boldness to engage in life as passionately as possible. If there is any one reason to read this book, it is about opening our minds to consider the possibility of something or Someone larger than us. With humility and a teachable heart, there is much to gain from the reading of this book, chiefly, the call to consider the merits of both the non-religious and religious and to ask ourselves once again: What/Who do we really believe in? The author has given us 11 reasons to believe in a Divine God. For the rest of us, even if only 1 of them could nudge a person toward belief, it would have made the author glad.
  
  Paul M. Gould (PhD, Purdue University) is associate professor of philosophy and director of the philosophy of religion master's program at Palm Beach Atlantic University in West Palm Beach, Florida. He is the founder and president of the Two Tasks Institute, an apologetics institute and podcast, and is on the faculty of Summit Ministries and the Colson Center Fellows Program.
  
  Rating: 4 stars of 5.
  
  conrade
  This book has been provided courtesy of Brazos Press and NetGalley without requiring a positive review. All opinions offered above are mine unless otherwise stated or implied.
• 
  Matt Hill

  a really great current book of apologetics .. i'm a sucker for framing things in terms of story, so i'm on board with this book right away .. the idea here is that there are things that are common to all people .. clues to our place in the universe .. things like longing for beauty, a sense of morality, the need for love, the desire to transcend and find meaning, etc etc etc .. these things cry out for a story that explains them all in context .. the christian gospel is the story that does this best .. (i'd argue it's the only story that really explains all of them adequately . and has the added benefit of also itself *being a story* .. the "true myth" .. the framing of this story also includes lots of references to well known stories, movies, books, etc. .. imo this is the exact right approach to presenting and defending the gospel .. it's the move Paul makes in Athens, where he seeks to find bridges to the audience .. to find things they *already believe* and then unpack those beliefs and give them the truest context for them ... recommended to all 10/10
• 
  JP

  I embraced the early chapters as a balanced debate between science and theism. As the eleven topical chapters progressed, I found less of this balance. The author was open about that, and relied in part on the arguments made along the way as reason to tip in one direction. That criticism aside, I found this a compelling and thoughtful argument. It covers also covers some basic philosophical concepts that I hadn’t understood before, such as reductionism. I’ve read more than average in this genre and still found multiple novel and convincing points.
• 
  David Fosco

  Paul does an excellent job exploring and explaining the reason why we know God exists. Writing in such a way that even an average person can understand.
  
  I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
• 
  Nancy

  FT rec 12/31/22. Palm Beach Atlantic University,
  Prof w/grad students, MA ? prgm